Academic Skills is here to help you study better. Our services are designed to help you analyze your strengths and your struggles to determine your best study plan for any course. Use our resources to build a strong foundation of intentional tactics and strategies to approach classes with more confidence.

Services Offered

Appointments

are 30-minute individual consultations to help you troubleshoot your experience around specific topics.

Workshops

are 90-minute one-off small group discussions to develop strategies around specific learning topics.

Self-Guided Workshops

are videos and activities accessible any time to guide problem-solving.

Online Resources

are worksheets that provide study skill guidance.

Subjects/topics

Make a Study Plan

  • Understand what you are being asked to think about, learn, and deliver.
  • Establish what you should do every week to sustain learning throughout the quarter.
  • Strategize methods and pacing for review and preparation for major tests and assignments.

Time Management

  • Analyze your own time-management practices for strengths and weaknesses.
  • Learn how to protect your life-work balance by finding and preserving your best free time.
  • Develop your personalized system by evaluating a variety of time management tools.

Fighting Procrastination

  • Examine why you procrastinate in the first place.
  • Develop your capacity to notice and work with the internal energies that stall you out.
  • Share and/or develop your “treatment plan” for work that is likely to be procrastinated.

Focus

  • Investigate your awareness of what interferes with your concentration.
  • Share and develop strategies for mitigating or eliminating external and internal distractions.
  • Discuss methods for building stamina in academic concentration.

Test Readiness

  • Discuss your evaluations of course material. How can you tell if you have missed anything?
  • Troubleshoot your ideas about timing. When should you review? Why?
  • Develop the strategy of your review considering topics to revisit and review activities.

Reading Efficiency

  • Talk about the purposes of your reading assignments in terms of course ideas and demands.
  • Compare different note-taking regimens for improvement of focus and comprehension.
  • Develop your strategies for intensive review and/or retrieval of reading material.

Lecture Strategies

  • Determine how to prepare for lecture for maximum comprehension while listening.
  • Develop your strategies for rapid information capture that enhances intense listening.
  • Develop efficient means of lecture review and indexing to allow for retrieval and self-testing.

Confronting Confusion

  • Talk about how to stay calm and amused when facing confusion, even under deadlines.
  • Practice isolating, categorizing, and weighing the importance of confusing bits.
  • Compare methods for expanding comprehension through targeted inquiry.

Confidence

  • Talk about how to identify and interrogate the sources of weak self-concept in your courses.
  • Compare experiences with relevant and irrelevant threats to self-efficacy.
  • Develop strategies for honest self-evaluation that leaves positive self-concept intact.

Motivation

  • Practice articulating your goals even if you think you don’t have any.
  • Develop strategies for generating interest, desire, or amusement.
  • Exchange ways to link even the most tedious of classes to what you really want to do or be.

Coordinator Contact Info

  Emma Cristofanicristofani@ucsb.edu | ext. 2946